IOP members share in US prizes for fundamental physics

11 November 2014

IOP member Prof. Sean Hartnoll was presented with a New Horizons in Physics Prize at a gala event in Silicon Valley, California, on 9 November.

Prof. Hartnoll, of Stanford University in the US, was awarded the $100,000 prize “for applying holographic methods to obtain remarkable new insights into strongly interacting quantum matter”. Up to three New Horizons prizes are awarded each year to “promising junior researchers who have already produced important work”.

The prizes are funded by a grant from the Milner Foundation. It also funds the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which was presented at the same event. The award was made this year “for the most unexpected discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing as had long been assumed”.

Among the winners to share the 2015 prize was Prof. Saul Perlmutter and his Supernova Cosmology Project Team, including IOP fellows Prof. Isobel Hook and Prof. Richard Ellis. Prof. Hook is based in the astrophysics department at the University of Oxford, and Prof. Ellis is the Steele Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and a former director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge.